Mac Mini M1 Problems

Headache After Upgrading From Catalina To Sonoma

Having come from a 10+ year old MacBook Air that’s still running smoothly on macOS Catalina; I find it a bit disconcerting how I need to troubleshoot through weird bugs and errors on a modern M1 Apple Silicon Mac Mini running macOS Sonoma 14. I’ve used Mojave, El Capitan and Catalina on the Air and don’t remember having this many bugs/errors…

Anyhow, this post will mainly be bullet points on how I troubleshoot the issues encountered. I will be updating this post as I find solutions to further problems. Hope it helps you!

Problems On My Mac Mini M1 2020 (So Far)

1. Unable to eject connected disks
2. Universal Control not connecting with iPad Mini 6
3. Apps unable to open when downloaded outside of the Mac App Store

Error: Cannot Eject Connected Disks

• Close all active applications that could be using the disk.
• Force restart Finder.
• Log out and log back in. Try ejecting the disk again.
• Turn off the computer and unplug the drive after the drive stops spinning/light turns off.

Note About Thunderbolt External Enclosures—Unsafe Shutdowns

• Despite ejecting Thunderbolt¹ drive volumes, the drive remains connected within Disk Utility. If the drive is unplugged while the computer is running, it will result in +1 in the “unsafe shutdown” counter.
• After researching for other users facing similar issues with their SSD enclosures, it seems to be a problem with the Mac NVME driver not fully ejecting the Thunderbolt device.
• To prevent unsafe shutdowns, I make sure to only physically disconnect when the Mac is off.

Error: Universal Control Not Working

Here are the troubleshooting steps.

• Toggle off “Block all incoming connections” and “Enable stealth mode” in System Settings > Network > Firewall > Options.
• In the same window, add “Control Center.app” (/System/Library/CoreServices/ControlCenter.app) and “Universal Control.app” (/System/Library/CoreServices/UniversalControl.app) to “Allow incoming connections”.
• Remember to turn on bluetooth on both devices and connected to the same WiFi network.
• In System Settings > Displays > Advance, ensure all three toggles are on under “Link to Mac or iPad”.
• Confirm any third-party firewall/network filter is not blocking Universal Control, e.g. Little Snitch, LuLu, NetBarrier.
• Both devices should be signed in under the same Apple ID with 2FA turned on.
• If you’ve done all the above but it’s still not connecting/device is not being recognized; sleep your Mac and try again upon wake.
• To confirm it has worked, you should see a second device graphic next to your main monitor, in System Settings > Displays. Clicking the + button will show “Link keyboard and mouse to” and your device name e.g. ipadmini6. You can arrange the display so that you can slide the mouse easily to the remote device.

Error: “The App is Damaged and Can not be Opened on Mac”

• This is caused by com.apple.quarantine, a safety feature. It prevents opening apps from unidentified developers or apps downloaded outside of the Mac App Store.
• As I often use Homebrew or download apps directly from GitHub repos, I get this error quite often.
• To remove the quarantine attribute from the app, open terminal and type the following. This is an example for the app PeaZip.

1xattr -d com.apple.quarantine /Applications/peazip.app

• If you want to remove the attribute recursively (including all its files and subfolders), add the -r flag. For example:

1xattr -r -d com.apple.quarantine /Applications/Feishin.app